Expert guidelines suggest anything from 2.5 to 5 hours of moderate intensity exercise per week or 1.25 to 2.5 hours of vigorous intensity exercise. This is from the US Dept of Health and Human Services –
For substantial health benefits, adults should do at least 150 minutes (2 hours and 30 minutes) to 300 minutes (5 hours) a week of moderate-intensity, or 75 minutes (1 hour and 15 minutes) to 150 minutes (2 hours and 30 minutes) a week of vigorous-intensity aerobic physical activity, or an equivalent combination of moderate- and vigorous-intensity aerobic activity. Preferably, aerobic activity should be spread throughout the week.
Additional health benefits are gained by engaging in physical activity beyond the equivalent of 300 minutes (5 hours) of moderate-intensity physical activity a week.
Adults should also do muscle-strengthening activities of moderate or greater intensity and that involve all major muscle groups on 2 or more days a week, as these activities provide additional health benefits
https://health.gov/sites/default/files/2019-10/PAG_ExecutiveSummary.pdf
It’s great that around the world many government health departments are recommending that last paragraph – Adults should also do muscle-strengthening activities of moderate or greater intensity and that involve all major muscle groups on 2 or more days a week.
It is awesome that these guidelines are now being written with the understanding that the higher the intensity the less time needs to be invested. Understanding that intensity forces your body to recruit more of everything (calories, muscle tissue, joints, neural connections, hormones) and in doing so, creates the most change physiologically is key! Read more about intensity in this previous post. The key takeaway here is higher intensity is better for us and takes less time!!
The other significant mention in the recommendations is strength training. Finally it seems the SECRET that all good trainer’s know is becoming mainstream.
Training with heavy weights is crucial to building lean muscle and burning fat. When we do this and we bring INTENSITY, we are sure-fire going to be successful!
There are 3 key components for all of you strapped for time – and actually these apply to ANY training program but the list below is for a 30-40 minute session.
- always do ankle, hip, thoracic and shoulder mobility drills first, this only has to be 5 minutes or so. You can add a couple of core/primal movements to these maybe stretching the time out to 10 minutes.
- next up you need to do a heavy lift, squat, bench, overhead press, deadlift and it could also be a row or cleans. Do warm up set of 5 reps at a lower weight and then 4 or 5 sets of 5 reps at 80% of your 1 rep max.
- finally either a flat out HIIT cardio over 5 or 10 minutes or a strength cardio over 10 or 15 minutes. The work to rest timings are 30/30 seconds or 60/60 seconds. There are a variety of strength movements that you can do including thrusters, ground to above head/snatches, push ups/bench, squats and lunges (weighted) and more plus power movements like burpees, jumps, wall balls etc.
This structure above is very easy to program and will TORCH fat and build muscle.
Now is the big part! To maintain the intensity you need for this training to be successful you must follow a timing protocol. Obviously the HIIT component is essentially an EMOM (every minute on the minute), a video explanation is HERE. Also at that video location in the notes are details of how to set up the timer plus the links to GooglePlay and the Apple version.
So the HIIT/EMOM is dictated by the timer and also the lifting component is too. This is every 3 minutes, so either 3 minutes plus 12 or 15 depending whether you do 4 or 5 sets. This part is therefore 15 or 18 minutes.
You can get an awesome workout done, with appropriate intensity in 5-10 minutes (mobility/core) + 15-18 (strength) + 10-15 (HIIT/EMOM) = 30 to 43 minutes.
